I Went to a Famous Fat Camp

Bloomberg just published a big article about the end of one of the titans of the weight loss summer camp world, Camp Shane.

I went to Camp Shane for three summers. After 6th, after 7th and after 8th. You lose a lot of weight, you get attention from girls for the first time, you starve, you come home. You field compliments, you start to eat like a normal person, you field questions, you gain the weight back and you go back for another summer. When I think about the destructive information I put into my body and my skin across those summers of binge and purge I shudder.

I always valued the experience from a social point of view. I ended up feeling a level of confidence that I believe has suited me well for the rest of my life. I learned how to make friends, I learned how to make girl friends and girlfriends for the first time really since early elementary school too. I had my first kiss there, a girl named Nikki who told me I was horrible at kissing and made me practice on her neck. I still have a couple pictures of my time from Camp Shane and to me I look happy. I’m losing weight, I’m getting to second base, I’m discovering new music.

This article doesn’t really change my memories of the camp, I am not shocked that horrible things happened there, I’m not shocked the family tore each other apart, avarice combined with money can do that. But it is one of those moments where everything I thought about Camp Shane is thrown a bit more into question. Is what I learned about romantic relationships from going to Camp Shane right? Are the friends I still wonder about maybe secretive about having gone to a fat camp? Are most of them still fat?

A lot of parents forced their kids to go to fat camp. Not mine. My parents didn’t force much of anything on me. That was sometimes good, sometimes bad. But it was my idea, looking in the back of the New York Times magazine and seeing a kid pulling at a drawstring with a foot long gap between his current size and what his pants could hold.

You can’t really write without a thesis but here I am, I loved fat camp, I have so many great memories, I lived more dangerously, more socially and more youthfully than I ever did at home. I felt something magical all the time in those summers. And I loved spending weeks not being singled out for being fat. If a girl liked me or she didn’t, cool, but the dealbreaker wasn’t my size. If my team lost or won at basketball, cool, but the dealbreaker wasn’t my size. That’s really how the world should be. But also in reading this article it’s clear that the world shouldn’t be like Camp Shane.